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If you or I had six broken ribs, we would have a hard enough time just watching the Super Bowl. But Ravens safety Bernard Pollard played on Sunday with his ribs in that condition.

Pollard had hurt his ribs earlier in the season, but however much they had healed didn’t matter after the first play from scrimmage in the Super Bowl, when 49ers tight end Vernon Davis landed on Pollard and rebroke his ribs.

“For all of us as football players, there’s just pain period,” Pollard said, as reported by baltimoreravens.com. “It’s a very rough sport, a very intense sport. The thing about your ribs, and especially with the player I am, you need all that to wrap up, tackle, do the things you want to hitting-wise, run, breathe. It gets tough sometimes.

“But I think for the most part a lot of teammates count on me to go out there and play 100 percent and do what I can to help them. Sometimes you’ve got to shut up and put up with it to be a teammate. Everybody understands it.”

And everybody should also understand why Pollard couldn’t be his usual self on Sunday.

“I just knew I wasn’t going to be able to be the same player I wanted to be,” Pollard said.

The rib problems from earlier in the season actually hadn’t even come from contact with opponents, but from other Ravens.

“The craziest thing about it was that the six ones that I broke, or that I fractured, they were all by my teammates,” Pollard told KILT radio in Houston. “So it’s just kind of crazy that none of the opponents did it until Vernon Davis landed.”